Harvest

This is why I love North Dakota!

Prayer

Prayer is the act of attempting to communicate with a deity or spirit. Purposes for this may include worshipping, requesting guidance, requesting assistance, confessing sins, as an act of reparation or to express one's thoughts and emotions. The words of the prayer may take the form of intercession, a hymn, incantation or a spontaneous utterance in the person's praying words. Secularly, the term can also be used as an alternative to "hope". Praying can be done in public, as a group, or in private. Most major religions in the world involve prayer in one way or another.

I never gave it a second thought about our Church's prayer chain until just recently. See we have this thing in our church a whole list of people...you start with one and that person calls the next and so on...each person says a prayer to help whoever starts the prayer chain. My aunt was diagnosed with cancer not too long ago in her lung. On 8-8-08 at 8:00 a.m. they went in and removed part of the lung. After sending that off to the lab and finally receiving the test results back from mayo clinic we have learned that the rest of the lung does indeed have cancer as well. So today mid-afternoon she goes in to have the rest of her lung completely removed. Hopefully this will take care of it. They are unsure yet though if she will have to do radiation and chemo but probably because the type of cancer that she has is very aggressive and is also in some of the lymph-nodes. After finding this out on Saturday as we were driving to Bismarck to see her, the first thing I did was start the prayer chain. Prayer is amazing and I truly believe that with all the people praying for her she will find the strength with God to fight this!

TGIF!

After going home the other morning to grab something...this is what I found. Angus is not allowed on our furniture at all and little did we know that she was doing this during the day while we were not home. Our dog was born deaf so she doesn't hear anything when we open the door and come in. I just started laughing because I thought wow...she is just a sneaky little thing! So here is our not so perfect pooch!

weekend update!

Saturday I went to my first ever turtle race! What an event! Upham holds this event once a year for the past 29 years. You put your turtle in the center circle and stand around the white circle about 15 feet out...then you lift the container that all of the turtles are held in and watch them go! I was just amazed that so many people turn out for the turtle races...who would've guessed!

On Sunday we went down to Bismarck to visit my aunt. Check out her caring page website: http://www.caringbridge.org/cb/viewJournal.do?method=executeInit. This will tell you the whole story. She looks good and we are praying the results come back in our favor so they don't have to remove the whole lung! Pray for her!

Sunflowers!

If you have never been to North Dakota you wouldn't know that this time of year is harvest for us. That means combining late nights, running the grain cart, and crabby farmers. I do love this time of year though. The sunflowers are starting to pop and they are so beautiful. The heads on a sunflower can get very very large and when you look across a field that is full of sunflower heads it makes you very cheery. When I was in highschool I was told that the sunflower head follows the sun. I was completely intrigued by this. If you watch the sunflower head you will notice that their heads are turned to the east in the morning when the sun comes up and it really does follow the sun throughout the day. When you look at them in the evening you will notice they now face the west because the sun is setting. What a weird little flower!

Canning

Have you ever canned peaches? Well I haven't..that is until this past weekend. See my husband loves canned peaches and peaches are in season right now so my mom being the awesome mother-in-law that she is said that I should come up and she would help me can peaches. I thought that there couldn't be much to it so I said why not, plus I would get to spend some time with mom. So on Saturday afternoon we started to can peaches. Wow! Messy, sticky, lots of pots and pans, and time time time! The whole process isn't hard to grasp and is actually pretty easy, but wow...that is how I can best describe canning. After canning 6 canners of 8 jars per canner on Saturday we still had more peaches left...so that left Sunday! Two canners were done on Sunday and then we headed up to Bottineau to see my grandma in the home! She is doing much better and will hopefully be able to head home soon!

I know I'm going a little backwards but now I have to tell you about Friday...We decided late afternoon to head to Newburg on Friday night because Tyler Moen had called my Tyler and asked him to harvest for him this weekend. So we get out to Moen's house and Moen said I need you to go to Fargo to pick up a trailor we just bought. Now my husband Tyler had been up since about 4:30 a.m. that morning for his regular job and didn't want to travel to Fargo, which is about a 5 hour drive or more in a semi, by himself. So I went with! Holy smokes for bumpy! We left Newburg about 8:00 p.m. Friday night and drove all the way to Fargo to pick up this trailor. We pull in and hitch on about 1:00 a.m. Then we head over to the truck stop so we can sleep, unfortunately the truck stop was completely full...so back to Grand Forks we go! Arriving in GF around 2:15 a.m. we finally get to go to sleep. Now imagine if you will two grown people sleeping in a twin size bed in the sleeper! It was definately cozy...Needless to say we finally got back to Newburg around 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning and were both completely exhausted. But it was an experience neither of us will forget!